The War Chief of the Ottawas : A chronicle of the Pontiac war eBook

No sooner was New France vanquished than the British
began building new forts and blockhouses in the hinterland.
[Footnote: By the hinterland is meant, of course,
the regions beyond the zone of settlement; roughly,
all west of Montreal and the Alleghanies.] Since the
French were no longer to be reckoned with, why were
these forts needed? Evidently, the Indians thought,
to keep the red children in subjection and to deprive
them of their hunting-grounds! The gardens they
saw in cultivation about the forts were to them the
forerunners of general settlement. The French
had been content with trade; the British appropriated
lands for farming, and the coming of the white settler
meant the disappearance of game. Indian chiefs
saw in these forts and cultivated strips of land a
desire to exterminate the red man and steal his territory;
and they were not far wrong.

Outside influences, as well, were at work among the
Indians. Soon after the French armies departed,
the inhabitants along the St Lawrence had learned
to welcome the change of government. They were
left to cultivate their farms in peace. The tax-gatherer
was no longer squeezing from them their last sou as
in the days of Bigot; nor were their sons, whose labour
was needed on the farms and in the workshops, forced
to take up arms. They had peace and plenty, and
were content. But in the hinterland it was different.
At Detroit, Michilimackinac, and other forts were
French trading communities, which, being far from
the seat of war and government, were slow to realize
that they were no longer subjects of the French king.
Hostile themselves, these French traders naturally
encouraged the Indians in an attitude of hostility
to the incoming British. They said that a French
fleet and army were on their way to Canada to recover
the territory. Even if Canada were lost, Louisiana
was still French, and, if only the British could be
kept out of the west, the trade that had hitherto
gone down the St Lawrence might now go by way of the
Mississippi.

The commander-in-chief of the British forces in North
America, Sir Jeffery Amherst, despised the red men.
They were ’only fit to live with the inhabitants
of the woods, being more nearly allied to the Brute
than to the Human creation.’ Other British
officers had much the same attitude. Colonel
Henry Bouquet, on a suggestion made to him by Amherst
that blankets infected with small-pox might be distributed
to good purpose among the savages, not only fell in
with Amherst’s views, but further proposed that
dogs should be used to hunt them down. ’You
will do well,’ Amherst wrote to Bouquet, ’to
try to inoculate the Indians by means of Blankets
as well as to try every other method that can serve
to extirpate this Execrable Race. I should be
very glad if your scheme for hunting them down by
dogs could take effect, but England is at too great
a Distance to think of that at present.’
And Major Henry Gladwyn, who, as we shall see, gallantly
held Detroit through months of trying siege, thought
that the unrestricted sale of rum among the Indians
would extirpate them more quickly than powder and
shot, and at less cost.